A Giant Arrives in Byzantium: What Really Happened During the First Crusade

Here’s a quick glance into the initial circumstances and events leading up to and comprising the First Crusade. Rodney Stark, author of The Victory of Reason and The Rise of Christianity, shows the men behind the myths.

There has been a great deal of antireligious nonsense written about the Crusades, including charges that the knights marched east not because of their religious convictions but in pursuit of land and loot. The truth is that the crusaders made enormous financial sacrifices to go – expenditures that they had no expectations of making back. For example, in order to finance a company of crusaders, Robert, Duke of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror), pawned the entire Duchy of Normandy to his brother King William of England for ten thousand marks, an amount that would have paid a year’s wages to 2,500 ships’ captains. To raise such a sum, the king had to impose a new tax on all of England (which caused many angry protests). Similarly, Godfrey of Bouillon sold his entire county of Verdun to the king of France and mortgaged his county of Bouillon to the bishop of Liège. Moreover, most of the crusaders knew they probably would never return, as expressed in many wills and letters they left behind. In fact, very few of them did survive.

It is important to recognize that only a small percentage of Western knights heeded the pope’s call to arms; nearly everyone stayed home. Those who did go were closely tied to one another by bonds of marriage and kinship. For example, Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy sent three sons and a grandson on the First Crusade; three men married to Tête-Hardi’s daughters joined them, as did the husband of Tête-Hardi’s granddaughter Florina, Sven of Denmark. Scandinavians such as Sven and Normans were extremely overrepresented among the crusaders, and many of the Franks who volunteered, like the Tête-Hardis, had Norman relatives.

A Giant Arrives in Byzantium

The First Crusade consisted of four main armies, two of which were made up of Norman knights and led by Norman noblemen: Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Bohemond, Prince of Taranto (of the Norman Kingdon of Sicily). Aided by his nephew Tancred, Bohemond played the leading role in the success of the First Crusade.

Although Emperor Alexius had put out the call for help, he was apprehensive about having Prince Bohemond in Constantinople. And with good reason: Bohemond (ca. 1058-1111) was the son of Robert Guiscard, and along with his father he had repeatedly defeated Byzantine armies, some led by Alexius himself. Back in 1081, after taking control of Italy and Sicily, Guiscard and Bohemond had sailed their Norman troops across the Adriatic Sea, invading the primary Byzantine territory. Alexius had marched north to expel the Normans, only to be badly defeated at the Battle of Dyrrhachium. While still in his early twenties, Bohemond defeated Alexius in two battles in northern Greece, thus putting the Normans in control of Macedonia and nearly all of Thessaly.

Bohemond was nearing forty when he arrived in Constantinople on April 9, 1097. He was still a commanding figure. Alexius’s daughter Anna, who was fourteen at the time she met the Norman leader, wrote a remarkable sketch of Bohemond many years later: “The sight of him inspired admiration, the mention of his name terror…. His stature was such that he towered almost a full cubit [about twelve inches] over the tallest men.” In fact, his real name was Mark; his father had nicknamed him Bohemond (after the mythical giant) because of his great size as an infant. Anna continued:

“He was slender of waist…perfectly proportioned…His skin was…very white…His hair was lightish-brown and not so long as that of other barbarians….There was a certain charm about him, but it was somewhat dimmed by the alarm his whole person inspired; there was a hard, savage quality in his whole aspect, due, I suppose to his great stature and his eyes; even his laugh sounded like a threat to others….His arrogance was everywhere manifest; he was cunning, too.”

Bohemond’s meetings with Emperor Alexius were tense. But the two leaders appeared to come to an agreement, as Bohemond led his troops across the Bosporus to join forces with the crusader army commanded by Godfrey of Bouillon. A few days later a third crusader army, led by Raymond IV of Toulouse, arrived, followed in two weeks by the Duke of Normandy’s forces. In all, probably about forty thousand crusaders were available for battle – or as many as fifty thousand fewer than had set out for the Holy Land. Some had turned back, but most had been lost to disease or in encounters fought with local forces along the route.

Alexius had never anticipated that thousands of high-ranking European nobles and knights would answer his call for help against the Turks. Few upper-class Byzantines engaged in military activities, and for centuries the armies of the empire had consisted of mercenaries and even slaves – often under the command of a eunuch. Now Alexius was confronted with thousands of men who had come of their own free will and were dedicated to a cause; he and his court thought them to be dangerous barbarians.

[…]

[The crusaders] supposed that Alexius would lead a joint force of Byzantine and Western warriors, but when the time came to attack the Turks, Alexius did not take command. Nor did he merge his army with the crusaders. Instead he sent a small contingent to accompany them only so far as needed to recover recently lost Byzantine territory. His position was that if the crusaders wanted to push on to the Holy Land, that was their own concern, but that “Jerusalem was strategically irrelevant to the empire.” The “barbarians” would have to go it alone.

[…]

Although the crusaders held Alexius in contempt, they were not deterred by the lack of Byzantine troops. Rather, after defeating overconfident Muslim armies at Nicaea and Dorylaeum, they marched boldly on the city of Antioch, the main barrier to the Holy Land. Antioch, in what is today southern Turkey, was a strongly fortified city on the side of a mountain and with direct access to the sea. The crusaders lacked sufficient forces to surround Antioch, so the city continued to be resupplied. When winter came, the crusaders ran out of food and some starved to death. Of course, Emperor Alexius easily could have sent them supplies by sea, but he did not. He ordered the small contingent of Byzantine soldiers to withdraw.

Incredulous Victors

Soon a large Muslim relief force arrived. Greatly outnumbered, the crusaders formed up as heavy infantry and gave the Muslims, all of whom were cavalry, a terrible defeat. As the Muslims began to retreat, Bohemond appeared with the remaining Christian cavalry, numbering perhaps three hundred. Their thundering charge turned the Muslim defeat into a massacre.

That still left Antioch unconquered. Making contact with Christians within the city, Bohemond found a Muslim in command of a tower who could be bribed to open a postern gate. That night Bohemond led a small group of Normans into the city, and they quietly took command of ten towers and along stretch of wall, whereupon the remaining crusaders climbed into Antioch and wiped out the entire Muslim garrison.

Within a few days, however, a powerful new Muslim army arrived at the gates of Antioch, led by the Turkish sultan Kerbogha. In the face of this looming danger, Bohemond was acknowledged as the overall commander of the crusader army in recognition of his greater experience. Rather than accept a siege, he prepared the army to attack the Turks, realizing that this was the best military option, albeit “a dangerous gamble.” So on June 28 the remaining crusader forces marched through the Bridge Gate of Antioch to face Kerbogha’s far larger host. The Turks attacked but recoiled after colliding with the well-armored, disciplined heavy-infantry formations. It was, in many ways, the Battle of Tours all over again. The Muslim cavalry attacked and died. The crusader ranks seemed impregnable. Soon the Turks began to withdraw and then to flee. The crusaders tromped along in their close formations, overran Kerbogha’s camp, and killed everyone within reach. The only reason that some Turkish forces escape was that the crusaders lacked the horses needed to catch them. To have triumphed so completely against such a powerful enemy seemed incomprehensible to many crusaders, even after the fact. The story spread that a contingent of mounted saints had descended from heaven and joined in the attack.

Excerpted from Rodney Stark’s book, How the West Won.